‘Foundation’ Season Finale Recap: Till the Break of Dawn

This is gonna sound weird, but bear with me: Surprisingly little actually happens in Foundation‘s first-season finale, despite the fact that one of the main characters tears her own face off.

No, seriously! Despite yet another portentous title, “The Leap,” this climactic episode of Foundation does little more than cement its status quo. On Terminus, the nanobot ghost of Hari Seldon—reconstituted from a mixture of his own body and the casket-ship that became the infamous Vault—somehow manages to talk Anacreon and Thespis into an alliance after untold centuries of warfare, with Terminus coming along from the ride.

Please note that is easily the hardest part of the episode to swallow. Never in human history has anyone speechified hard enough to pacify two warring nations or races, except in the hazy afterglow of hindsight—kind of like how America has taught itself to believe that the “I Have a Dream” speech magically ended racism. From a psychohistorical perspective, so to speak, it’s bullshit.

But any rate, in the peace that follows, Salvor Hardin is informed by her mother Mari that she’s the biological child of none other than Gaal Dornick and her lover Raych, better known to the citizens of Terminus as the two people responsible for the murder of Hari Seldon. This explains Salvor’s psychic abilities, insofar as she inherited them from Gaal, but it raises more questions than it answers. Never mind the fact that Seldon’s synthetic self brokered the peace that now governs Anacreon, Terminus, and Thespis—wouldn’t the fact that the town’s mayor’s wife bore the child of their messiah’s killers have been a bigger deal, even an open secret, prior to this point? It’s hard to imagine any other scenario, yet here we are.

Armed with this knowledge, Salvor says goodbye to her lover Hugo and sails off into space in search of Gaal Dornick, whom she encounters over a hundred years later in the watery world of Synnax, where all existing settlements have long since foundered under the rising seas. Salvor, who crash-landed on Synnax prior to Gaal’s arrival—given the cryosleep required for long-distance journeys it’s not entirely clear how long she’s been camped out on the planet’s surface, waiting for her mother—offers Gaal the Prime Radiant, the mystical-mathematical maguffin upon which so much of Foundation has rested. That’s the image on which showrunner/writer/director David S. Goyer chooses to leave things.

Meanwhile(ish), on Trantor, we see more of the fallout from Brother Dawn’s genetically-manipulated rebellion against his genetic dynasty. His older sibling Brother Day wipes out Dawn’s ersatz lover Azura’s entire circle of friends and family (and friends of the family, and family of the friends) with a flick of his hand, then sentences her to an entire life without sight, hearing, taste, or touch, for the crime of sundering Brother Dawn from his genetic predecessors. The cruelty is both imaginative and impressive.

Yet unlike Brother Dusk, Day is prepared to forgive Dawn and reincorporate him into the governance of the Empire. Until, that is, the robotic servant Demerzel interprets her loyalty directive and kills Dawn, even as Day and Dusk engage in a slapfight over their sibling’s future. Demerzel is loyal to the Empire above all, she says, but the act of killing seems to take enough out of her that she needs to rip her own face off in order to express her emotional tumult. Not a good sign for the future!

Indeed, things are worse than they first appear. It turns out that it isn’t just Brother Dawn’s genetics that have been manipulated by the dynasty’s enemies: It’s the body of the original Cleon himself that has been contaminated. Brother Day responds by taking a candelabra and shattering Cleon’s transparent sarcophagus. I can’t imagine this augurs well for the future of the Empire, any more than its most faithful servant tearing herself apart does.

(Here’s where I’ll note that despite being a massive Lee Pace fan, I’m grateful that the show actually cast separate actors—good ones at that—to play his older and younger selves instead of digitally altering his age upward and downward. Terrence Mann and Cassian Bilton have handed in some of the series’ best work.)

What does it all mean for the future of this show, thought? That, I’m less certain about. It’s already been renewed for a second season, so you don’t need to worry about that. However, there still is a certain lopsided quality to it all, with the Cleon material standing head and shoulders above the Gaal/Salvor/Hari stuff. The burst of action that punctuated the first season’s last few episodes mitigated this somewhat, but now that Gaal and Salvor are simply adrift together on the surface of a drowned world, it seems like things may get tilted in favor of the Cleons yet again. The missteps involving Hari’s big speech and the secret of Salvor’s parentage certainly don’t help.

But I think there’s much to be enjoyed and admired in Foundation overall. The commitment to far-out ideas about the flow of history (punctuated though it might be by individual actions), the emphasis on grand science-fiction vistas, the performances of Lee Pace and Terrence Mann and Cassian Bilton as the Cleons—there’s room to grow a very good show around these component parts, even as the Lou Llobell/Leah Harvey/Jared Harris segments remain hit or miss. A decent chance—isn’t that all Foundation is asking for, in the end?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Foundation Episode 10 on Apple TV+